I find your lack of faith disturbing

Agree with Keith. We need versioning. We might also might want to switch names when there’s a major change in the nature of thing. Perhaps “World War” becomes “Earth Battle. Or “Jaguar.”

Keith semi-beat me to it. I envisaged using software numbering schemes So you have WW 4.0 (invasion of Poland) D-Day might be WW 4.4.3.
And then the Spanish Civil War & Japan in China were WW 4 (Beta 1.0 & 2.0). Or we could go to the Microsoft scheme so you this newest “war” is WW 2001 (Oh, I forgot it is actually WW 1979).

Or maybe really use the Star Wars model
WW I A Whole New World
WW II Napoleon Blues
WW III Trenches, Machine Guns and Gas Attacks, Oh My!
WW IV A Tale of Two Empires
WW V No, Wait This is the Real Evil Empire
WW VI The Dispossessed Strike Back

Y’know, even joking around about this stuff makes us all Nazis. Or jihadis. It’s so hard to tell the difference these days. Which is why I just refer to everyone who disagrees with me, even a little bit, as Nazis. I just find it easier to keep track of my enemies when they’re all labeled neatly. I used to use post-its, but they’d fall off during especially rigorous verbal combat. And then I’d get confused.

I recall seeing an old “Show of Shows” sketch where Sid Caesar plays a WWI American soldier in a trench, complete with saucer-shaped helmet. He hears about the armistice and jumps up joyously, shouting “Hooray, World War I is over.”

should be considered together, that is.

Surely WW VI : the Return of the Jihadi?

pwned!!

shouting “Hooray, World War I is over.”
I recall an Encyclopedia Brown case that revolved around a similar trope: A Civil War sword proved fake by having inscribed on it something like “for heroism in the 1st Battle of Bull Run”** with a date before the 2nd battle.

**AKA Civil War 2347.2.1.1 “It’s Not Just a Picnic”

For me, Boot’s gravest sin is that he has apparently never bothered to watch Star Wars. If he had, he would have noticed that the very first image in the movie is the words, “Episode IV: A New Hope”. Lucas never “relabeled” it. He always intended for there to be prequels.

How can one claim to be a freedom-loving white male American without having seen Star Wars?

“George Lucas relabeled his first Star Wars film “Episode IV” after producing three “prequels.”

Boot’s credibility is completely undermined by the fact that Star Wars was relabeled Episode IV in 1981, long before the prequels were produced.

And the Trojan War is just a beta version; WW 0.1.5.

Hell, Joe Haldeman did it best:

The Forever War

So you can’t have a World War if the US isn’t invited? . . . Napoleon’s campaigns.

But of course, the US was a participant in those wars, fighting the British more or less on Napoleon’s side 1812-1815, and earlier, fighting the revolutionary French 1798-1800.

I think World War I was when the Ugh camp of homo sapiens surprised the Gnrr camp of neanderthals with a barrage of thrown rocks.

This, of course, happened just short of 6,000 years ago.

If it weren’t for Ugh we’d all be speaking Gnrr today.

Will no one mention the Crusades?

(Suggested by 29 and Tuesday’s episode of ‘Spooks’.)

Hidari:

“Ladies and Gentlemen…I give you….the iWar!”

Which is being fought on the streets of Iraq and Eurabia even as we speak, alongside the μWar which is being fought with computer keyboards(*).

Both as part of the Asynchronous War on Librulizm (AWoL) paradigm.

= = =

(*) think Neo-Tech’s “micro-terrorists”… holy cow I like this term

I’m afraid this all brings back the old joke (British I think, but I’m not sure), that having been late for both World War I and World War II, the US was going to make sure they were on time for World War III by starting it themselves.

World War I: Gracile australopithecines vs. robust australopithecines.

Um. I’m no historian, but how were the Australians involved in the French and Indian war? How about the Norwegians? How about the Chinese? How about the non-colonial residents (we might call them natives) of South America or Africa? Same goes for all the other “world wars”.

Australia barely existed at the time of the French and Indian War. Containing campaigns in North America, the Caribbean, central Europe, India, and the Philippines, the Seven Years War, the Seven Years War was a conflict that had considerable relevance to large parts of the world. To be a “World War” does every part of the world have to participate?

Of course, to take the silliness further, the War of the Austrian Succession contained more or less the same theaters as the Seven Years War – fighting in North and Latin America, in India, and in Europe, but actually had fighting in more different parts of Europe – in Italy and the Mediterranean, in Central Europe, in the Low Countries, and even, tangentially, in Finland between Sweden and Russia. The Eighty Years War between Spain and Holland, which featured largely in the Netherlands, but also in both the Americas and the East Indies, could easily be called a world war in the same way the Seven Years War was.

To get back to your initial point, which is apparently that even World War I and World War II can’t be called world wars, that’s silly.

World War saw actual fighting largely in Europe, but there was also fighting in East Asia and the Pacific and in Africa, as well as in the Atlantic Ocean. Participants included not only most of the major European powers (although not, admittedly, the Norwegians), but also, eventually, the US and most of the central American states, Brazil, Japan, and China.

World War II, being, as it was, essentially two separate wars, involved even fighting again in Europe and the Atlantic, but also in north and east Africa, in the Middle East, in China, in southeast Asia, in the pacific and in New Guinea. Participants eventually included virtually every country in the world (I think most of the south American countries and Turkey ended up declaring war on the axis in early 1945).

I don’t think the phrase “World War” is meant to imply that everyone in the world participated, but it’s not simply ethnocentric to use the term – these were wars that involved a rather large percentage of the world’s surface.

Okay, but what do we call the First Interstellar War now?

Funny stuff! But you’ve got it wrong, all of you.

In reality, there was, is and will ever be only ONE World War:

the everlasting war between
GOOD (that is us, of course)
and
EVIL (that is them, of course).

So, since Eve gave the apple to Adam, or since Kain murdered Abel, we humans are involved in the ONE EVERLASTING WORLD WAR,
and yesterday it was US (God’s chosen nation) against Communism, today it’s US against Al Qaida and Iran (the evil is always and only ONE, as Goebbels correctly put it), and tomorrow it will be US against China + the UN,

and of course in the end the GOOD (= US !!) will win the final battle, Armaggedon, thanks to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

#36 WW 0.5: The endosymbiontist insurgency – establishment of mitochondrial/chloroplast sleeper cells . . .

Boor’s just pissy because none of the actual World Wars involved bits of the mainland US being blown to bits, a phenomenon that would really show people… something.

(before posting: typo uncorrected.)

\war{World War Three}
\subwar{Domestic Front War}
\subsubwar{The Democrats}
\subsubsubwar{The savagery of left-wing blog snark}

Clearly Boot is right that the 7 Years’ War or French and Indian War or whatever it’s been called needs to be rebranded. I guess “World War” is as good as any, given it was an almost-global military showdown between the world’s superpowers England and France (cf. A Nation Among Nations for the serious version of this argument). But by this standard the Cold War was not a World War, or was a Cold World War. So obviously we need Paris Hilton here: you use hotness to label the wars. I know this introduces Fahrenheit/Celsius differences into naming conventions, but isn’t it that kind of diversity that makes the world go round? Plus, imagine the arguments over assigning temperature values.

Trying to open a door for the scientists to join the fun here b/c for the life of me I couldn’t figure out a Worlds of Warcraft joke.

John Mark @ 42:

I’m from out West, and we’ve numbered our Interstate exits by mileage for as long as I can remember. I’d never seen the purely sequential system–which is truly irrational–until I moved to PA in 1999. So don’t tar us all with your elitist Eastern ways!

I propose calling everything east of the Alleghenies the Old United States.

contra John, I say there will be no true world war until the penguins take up arms against their oppressors!

It’s high time someone quoted Michael Flanders, in his inspired free translation of Georges Brassens:

War has had its apologians, ever since history began,
From the times of the Greeks and Trojans, when they sang of arms and the man,
But if you ask me to name the best, sir, I’ll tell you the one I mean,
Head and shoulders above the rest, sir, was the War of ’14-’18,
Head and shoulders above the rest, sir, stands the War of ’14-’18.

There were the wars against all those Louis’s, there were Caesar’s wars in Gaul,
The was Britain’s war in Suez, that wasn’t a war at all,
There was the war of the Spanish Succession, many other wars in between,
But they none of them made an impression like the war of ’14-’18,
They didn’t make the same impression as the war of ’14-’18.

The War of American Independence: that was enjoyable, by and large! —
Watching England’s free descendants busy defeating German Ge’arge,
But the Boer War was a poor war, And I’m still inclined to lean,
Though sir, it possibly isn’t your war towards the war of ’14-’18,
Though it probably isn’t your war, sir, the war of ’14-’18.

There are certainly plenty of wars to choose from, you pick whichever one you please,
Like the one we’ve had all the news from liberating the Vietnamese,
Or those wars for God and Country, be it Korean or Philippine,
Sir, if you’ll pardon my effrontery, give me the war of ’14-’18,
If you’ll pardon my effrontery, sir, the war of ’14-’18,

Every war has it’s own attraction from total war to border raid,
Call it rebellion, police action, war of containment or crusade,
I don’t underrate the late war we see so often on the screen,
But that wasn’t a really great war like the war of ’14-’18,
No, the late war wasn’t the Great War like the war of ’14-’18.

No doubt Mars, among his chattels, has got some really splendid war,
Full of bigger and bloodier battles that we’ve ever enjoyed before,
But until the time occurs, sir, when that greater war comes on the scene,
The one that I on the whole prefer, sir, is the war ’14-’18,
Yes, the one that I still prefer, sir, is the war of ’14-’18.